I've been using a Netatmo Welcome camera for the past month or so (review coming soon) and enjoying its facial recognition features, its completely free plans which save everything to an SD card and can connect to your Dropbox, and its neat little cylinder design. What I haven't liked, however, is the fact that it doesn't integrate with anything else I own. SmartThings? Nope. Google Home? Nada. Echo/Alexa? Niet. There's an IFTTT channel but that's about it. The cams are like the bastard children of Netatmo's ecosystem. Whereas the thermostat and weather station have Assistant and Alexa integrations, the cams aren't supported in either of these. But now, there's another way to control the Netatmo cams and no it's not what you think... Well it technically is because you already read the title of the post, but let's suppose you didn't. It's with (pause for effect) Facebook Messenger. Wait, whaaaa?

The Netatmo team thought it wiser to forego all these voice assistant fads and integrate with Messenger as a bot. After all, who doesn't want to type to check their camera instead of opening an app? Ok, ok, I get that there's a legit use case somewhere, but of all possible integrations to think of, Messenger was the first?!

In order to get things working, you'll have to head over to the Netatmo bot page on Facebook and start a chat. After authenticating with your account, you'll be able to control all of your Netatmo gear, including the cams, weather stations, thermostats, and more (check the FAQ link below). For cams, three requests are possible: who is home, see the last 3 events, and get a livestream image. And if you're done and don't want to enable this connection anymore, you can send "log out" to the bot or remove access to the cam from the Netatmo app.

Now let's hope Netatmo is also working on proper camera integration with Google Assistant (smart displays, specifically) and Alexa.

Comments

None whatsoever. I almost forgot they were a thing before writing this. And I'm about to forget again.

Nana Adu-Krow

Agreed. And does everyone remember the bot craze that happened awhile ago?

The most practical (and tangible) value bots have is removed the automated call service people are still subjected to in this day and age. I'd like to either speak to someone in a call center directly, or handle things via a bot.

The voice generated calls still are a chore.

IVBela

Wrong. There is no integration with weather station either. Only the thermostat. (Or I'm doing something wrong.)

Tiuri Elvander

Not tried it yet, but the FAQ clearly states that you can: "Ask for indoor and outdoor climate data, such as temperature, humidity, air quality, noise level". I've got quite a bit of their hardware but Netatmo make really strange choices when it comes to software and feature priorities. For instance, I can ask Alexa for the temperatures of each individual module, but that's not possible using Google assistant. I really dislike that they named their camera control app "Security", I feel that's misleading people into thinking it's an Android OS app.

Tiuri Elvander

I just asked it for the temperature of one of my indoor modules and received a reply giving me the temperature of the weatherstation itself, so I got some information from the bot but there's room for improvement.

Ron Knapik

Totally inappropriate. We need a web interface and device integration and they waste time on wastebook? I bought their presence cameras because they advertised web access which was not the case. I like the cams, but wastebook? Really?